Johnson: Spy gear fits in keys, lighters, coat hangers

I envisioned maybe an old guy, a fedora perched on the side of his head and a cigar lodged in his teeth.

Outside the place, after all, it did mention “investigations” and the like. And it is a tiny little joint, with the words “Spy Guys” done up in bright red letters above the windows. Along Beach Boulevard in Westminster, you cannot miss it. I walked in.

It is mid-afternoon, and the place is packed. There are no fedoras, no cigars, just Scott Cole, the lone salesman and lead technician, counseling a woman and her son on the best audio and video equipment available to keep bad guys from doing what they might to their business.

The others patiently wait. No one walks out. There is spying to be done. Some of it, well, is not so nice, sensible or fair.

I am crammed next to a 40-ish gentleman wearing a blue suit, a silver shirt, but no tie. The expensive shoes on his feet and watch on his wrist tells me he is likely a businessman of considerable means. We begin to chat. He refuses to tell me his name.

“Just call me ‘Bob,’” he finally tells me.

And that is the thing about this place. You could probably get a brand new puppy faster and more easily here than an honest first or last name. I walked in seeking tales of daring and intrigue and, I must tell you, I found them. But not of the kind even I had imagined.

Take “Bob,” for example. Turns out he is a regular here. Over the past several years, he estimates he dropped maybe a good $5,000 on an assortment of spy gear. Today he has his eye on a black audio recording device that is about the size of a fingernail. It costs $450, but Scott Cole swears it can pick up voices eight blocks away.

Bob considers it for awhile.

You have to understand where we are. It is a storefront with as much room in it as maybe a decent-sized walk-in closet. Nothing inside it is what it appears to be.

On the shelf behind Scott Cole are two Starbucks mugs. Yet they have never once held coffee, and never will. Rather, inside them are tiny cameras and microphones for, oh, say that not-so-chance breakfast meeting with a business partner you suspect is cheating you.

The coat hanger? The Zippo lighter? The set of car keys? That toilet brush? They are all video- and audio-recording devices.

“It’ll give you one hour of video and audio,” Cole says of the car keys. “Yes, we have toys.”

Bob points to the audio recorder in the display case that looks, amazingly, like, well, an audio recorder. He bought it for $250 awhile back when he suspected his girlfriend was cheating on him. He put it to use during one of their counseling sessions.

“I had it turned on and in my briefcase,” he explained, “and told them I had to step out to use the bathroom. Come to find out, she’s saying things about me that are not true!”

So it was adios, girlfriend, I say to Bob.

“No, she’s my fiancée now.”

On the recording he learned that the man he’d suspected she was having an affair with was merely a companion and someone who would listen to her, which was something Bob was incapable of being or doing because he spent too much time at work. Bob vowed he could be all of those things to her. Months later, he presented her with a ring.

“It’s not spying on people,” Bob insisted. “It’s all for your own protection. I didn’t want to be in a relationship I would regret later. But the device gave me the opportunity to make things better.”

Wait, I tell him. What about the fingernail-sized recorder?

“I’m going to drop it in my 3-year-old son’s backpack,” he explained.

It seems the boy came home from pre-school the other day with scratches on his face and fingers, Bob explained. The school, he said, gave him no answers.

“So I want to listen to see how the teacher and the others at the school are treating him.”

“The others come in for home and business surveillance,” he adds. “And then you have the other, uglier stuff – divorces and separations. Even a death in the family, you have siblings stealing things from the house.”

There, too, is Greg. It is actually his real name, though he asks that I not use his last name.

He is CEO of an Irvine technology company, and has stopped by to pick up a radio wave detector, an electronic “bug sniffer” and other gadgets for a job he has with a law firm that is worried someone may have planted bugs in its offices.

“I work mostly for high-wealth individuals who are worried their trade secrets might be jeopardized, that maybe their mistress might be discovered,” Greg says.

The attorneys, have they really been bugged?

“I’d be very surprised,” he replies. “But I’ll take their money.”

He leaves the store having purchased $571.01 worth of surveillance equipment and, for himself, an oak, fake-front mantle clock that can house a handgun.

“Hey, I have people wanting to kill me, too,” he explains as he exits.

The man who bought the alarm clock that actually is a camera/video recorder is every reason I left there feeling maybe a little unclean and quite a bit more suspicious of everyone and everything in my path.

It is a present for his wife, he said, one he plans to put on her side of their bed.

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